Mercury signs up to use the Cell

Mercury Computer Systems plans to utilise IBM's Cell microprocessor in medical imaging, industrial inspection, aerospace, defence, seismic processing and telecoms applications including radar, sonar, MRI, CT, digital and X-ray. The move will see Mercury become the first company outside of the games industry to adopt the state of the art chip. The Cell processor, which was developed by IBM, Toshiba and Sony Group, and is built around an architectural design featuring eight processing elements, will yield significant improvements in image quality during Mercury's medical imaging applications.

"The tremendous performance advantages afforded by the Cell processor will enable Mercury to address an even broader range of compute-intensive challenges for our customers," said Jay Bertelli, president and chief executive at Mercury.